Novell bigwig sticks foot in mouth

A TOP NOVELL executive has said sorry to the Free Software Foundation after he was caught making bold claims about how much his outfit supported the organisation.

Justin Steinman, Novell's director of marketing for Linux and open source claimed that the company was "a significant financial contributor" to theFSF.

Unfortunately Steinman was called out on the claim by Peter Brown, executive director of the FSF, who said that if Novell was a big supporter he had heard nothing about it.

Steinman admitted that he had got the finance thing wrong and was made a mistake. However by then there were dark mutterings on various bogs that Novell was hoping to make the claim and get away with it. Novell's standing among Open Saucers has been a bit low since it signed a deal with Microsoft.

Steinman told Network World that he had no intention of making false claims or providing misinformation to the market.

He said sorry to the FSF and to the open source community for making this misrepresentation. He admitted he should hvave double-checked the accuracy of his information before speaking.

Ah well, we all have our off days and it is the end of the week. µ